Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Being now a student of J. E. Purkyne University in Ústí nad Labem, that is in Czech Republic, I often visit Prague mainly to see the current exhibitions of photography and contemporary art. During my last visit I found myself at the exhibition of works by Alphonse Mucha, a Czech painter who is best known for his luxurious poster and product designs in Art Nouveau style. His cycle The Slav Epic presenting twenty monumental pictures was exhibited there. He spent 18 years creating the cycle and drew inspiration from Slav mythology and the history of the Czech nation. But they were not the paintings themselves that impressed me most. Flipping through the album dedicated to this cycle I discovered Mucha's photographic studies that he used to make drafts for pictures. After that I tried to find other examples of his photographs that he used abundantly. The photos which were taken just to serve as drafts for future paintings appeal to me as independent images that bear the essence of the photographic medium. Being very theatrical and carefully staged they still reveal the details of the surrounding space which has nothing to do with the painting as the result. The costumes, expression of the models' faces, their histrionic gestures, the studio interior, the grid drawn over the pictures, and sometimes the painter himself who posed for photographs - all together make the photos look extremely real, even more real than any documentary photography. I will not try to make any thorough analysis or add personal comments on this photos, you'd better just look at them. The photographs used here were taken from the following websites: poulwebb.blogspot.cz retro-vintage-photography.blogspot.cz